Am really chuffed to be a part of this project, funded by the team at DLUHC, to see how portable the in-house developed revenues and benefits system from Sedgemoor council is. We will also be looking at the licensing and governance model for making the system potentially open source – potentially a revolutionary move.
What’s also nice is that the project needed a home for its blog, and in an, er, semi-professional capacity, I was able to knock something up on LocalGov Blogs, along with the free version of the Blocksy theme.
As always when I run into WordPress issues, Steph Gray is on hand to help me. Thanks buddy!
For what it’s worth, my instinct is that the NHS might be the place that leads (by doing) the settler phase over the next 10-years. Showing by doing. The work of the last 2-years during the pandemic, the recent restructuring, and some conversations with people leading this work all make it sound like they’re explicitly investing in the work of the settler phase. Looking closer to my old home, the Office of the Public Guardian is doing this at a smaller scale.
In 2017, I was asked to ‘make digital happen’ at the council. Digital is such a broad agenda and needs to permeate everything we do and think about in the organisation. Although the ICT function in the council initiated ‘digital’, I didn’t want technology to be the focus of the change activity.
Two opportunities presented themselves in different service areas when we were about to experiment with service design. We engaged FutureGov, who worked alongside service leads, ICT business analysts, content designers and application support officers, exposing them to user-centred design and working in multi-disciplinary teams.
I’m always looking out for good examples of teams working in the open, and this WRA team are doing everything right. If you want to write good weeknotes about a digital project, just do what this team are doing, and you’ll be doing a great a job.
The important thing to pass on from our experience is that change doesn’t happen overnight. Patience and conviction of cause will help solve one problem at a time. You need to forge alliances and earn trust that will help change to happen.
Today is International Women’s Day. So, we asked a few of the women working in technology at Made Tech to share insights about equality and working in the industry, including how they’d change the tech industry for the better. Here’s what they said…
Eddie Copeland off of LOTI and I recorded a bunch of videos just after Christmas, aimed at senior-ish folk in councils who want to get up to speed on all things digital, data and technology.
I’m really pleased to be able to say that since last week, I have been working at Made Tech!
For the last decade or so I have been working with local government to modernise the way things get done: from early experiments with social media, to improving the user experience on websites, to getting to grips with the back office IT and all that entails.
Sometimes I have worked directly in councils, in Head of Service roles at places like Adur & Worthing or Croydon; sometimes as an interim, such as at Horsham or Reading. Just recently I have been a freelance consultant, working across a number of local authorities.
What I haven’t done before is work for a company that can support public sector change and modernisation at scale. Being a freelancer is all well and good, but there was only ever one of me and my own skill set has its limitations.
Joining Made Tech gives me the opportunity to keep talking to local government about how it can make best use of digital design, data and technology; only with the backing of an incredibly strong team of designers and technologists to actually make things happen.
What’s more, the cultural fit with the company is a perfect one. The commitment to capability building by sharing knowledge and experience and up-skilling client teams really speaks to me.
There are a whole bunch of people I have known and respected for a long time at Made Tech. Getting to spend time with Glen, Lorna, David, Matt, Emma, and others is going to be a fab experience. The new people I am meeting are also an incredible lot, and I am really excited about what we can make happen together.
I need to figure out what I am going to do with the SensibleTech website in the future, but for now it’ll stay where it is and the content won’t be disappearing. I dare say, though, that I will be blogging a bit more here than previously, as well as appearing now and then on more official channels.
If anyone in my network is interested in how Made Tech could help them make things better, please do get in touch.
The workshop that Lizzie and I delivered went down pretty well, I think. You can find out for yourself by watching it back.
It’s a quick canter through different methods of undertaking user research, aimed at those new to the whole idea. I think user research is a super-important thing for digital teams to get involved with as quickly as possible, because it’s a cultural game changer. If you want to be more user-centric in your work, there’s no better way of doing it than actually speaking to, and understanding, your users.
One of the elements of the Loosemore definition of digital that doesn’t get as much coverage as the rest is the bit about business, or operating, models. That’s probably because it’s really hard.
I think it is fair to say that this really is just the start of this conversation, but I really hope that folk can take inspiration from what Eddie shares in terms of thinking about how certain services could be completely transformed from the ground up.
As I explained in this post, it isn’t always going to be possible to be truly transformative, and sometimes less ambitious approaches are more suitable. But I think every council needs to have this kind of thinking in their lockers, ready to take the opportunities as they arise.
User research is one of the most important stages of any successful digital project. However it often gets missed, and that’s often because people just aren’t used to doing it.
Involving service users in research and testing is a big cultural change for organisations, and takes a fair bit of confidence to start doing for the first time.
In this workshop, Lizzie Bruce from Cake Consultancy joins me to introduce common user research methods, as well as some less well known ones.
We will also talk through how to arrange user research sessions for the first time – where to host them, how to recruit users, how to record sessions and turn them into actionable insights.
At the end of the workshop you will feel more confident about:
Including user research activities as part of your digital project
Choosing the best user research methods to meet your objectives
Setting up your user research sessions, in terms of location, equipment and practicalities
Following on from the workshop I ran with LGiU last week on digital for leaders (which went very well, thank you for asking), I shared a few bits with the delegates – further reading, if you will.
Part of that was a set of videos on YouTube that cover some of the important areas that folk in senior positions really need to understand, delivered by people with far greater expertise than me.
Here they are – try and get them in front of your senior leadership team, if you can, and book in a chat with them shortly afterwards to help them apply it to your organisational context!
1. Digital Government: Not Complicated, Just Hard – Tom Loosemore
2. Applying digital to everything – Janet Hughes
3. Situation Normal, Everything Must Change – Simon Wardley
4. Human-Centered Data Transformation – Kit Collingwood
5. Designing government services that meet user needs – Martin Jordan
For any digital transformation effort to be a success, it needs to have a organisation that is open to change to work with.
This is often a bit of a stumbling block, because even if you have an amazing digital team and a kick-ass programme in place, if the people across the organisation don’t understand what you’re on about, then you’re in trouble.
This is why one of the projects you need to initiate early on is a digital capability programme. This should provide just enough digital knowledge, understanding and – most important – confidence in the people you work with to keep things running smoothly.
There are a few different ways to approach this. Here’s some of the things I have found work well – you can pick and choose and adapt as you see fit!
Build your leaders’ digital confidence
There is no getting around the fact that you must have the buy in from senior people in your organisation. In fact, buy in doesn’t really cut it – they need to own this thing. Oftentimes leaders -whether they be politicians or senior management types – need a regular reminder of what really matters when it comes to digital and what they need to do to support this.
What I have found is that a one-off workshop is great for getting some excitement and momentum, but it’s really, really easy for that to dissipate if you don’t follow it up. I’d recommend getting workshops booked in for every other month with your most senior management team, if you can.
Another idea is to put in place a form of one to one coaching for senior people. Often they might not be willing to confess to not knowing things within a group context, so providing a safe space where they can perhaps be a little more vulnerable might be a good idea. It also helps foster your own relationship with them and builds trust, and gives you the chance to help them take a long term view of their need for understanding and commitment to the digital cause.
Digital champions or advocates
Building a network of enthusiastic and knowledgeable digital people across your organisation can be an incredibly useful way to spread goodwill about your efforts in departments other than your own. It’s really important though to avoid ‘milk monitor syndrome’ in creating yet another opportunity for people to volunteer for something nobody wants to do. One way to do this is to maybe avoid titles like ‘champions’ and instead go for something newer sounding – I like ‘advocates’.
One key thing is to engage with the already-enthused. Any network or community of practice like this will die a death if people feel they are forced to be there. Find those hidden, motivated digital enthusiasts who want to be a part of something and will make change happen because they want to.
Some of the things you can do to make your advocates network something people might actually want to join:
Run face to face events as well as online networking to build trust in the network
Make things available to your advocate network that other’s don’t get – whether early access to new digital services, learning and development opportunities or even just a sticker for their laptop
Organise an excursion – maybe to visit another similar organisation to yours to see how they do things, or perhaps to a digital company in another sector
Big thanks to the digital doers community for their help in sharing what has worked for them building these internal enthusiast networks.
10 things you need to know
This is something I have been banging on about for a while, and I have seen it – or similar – done really well in a couple of places. To me there is a basic amount of knowledge that you would want everybody in the organisation to know about digital and transformation. Not the specifics on how to use certain products or services, or even how to run agile ceremonies or user research, but instead focusing on the big picture things people really need to understand to ‘get’ what you are trying to achieve.
This could be delivered in a number of ways, but I like the scalability of an e-learning course, one that could be pitched to anyone in the organisation, from the CEO to front line workers. It should give everyone the core knowledge they need, so you can move quickly when working with other service areas.
Internal blogging or newsletter
Working in the open makes things better, we know this. However sometimes we can work more openly internally, to let people know what we are up to. It’s a great way to spread your cultural tentacles, whether in the form of a regular newsletter or an internal blog. It helps you ‘show the thing’ to a wider audience than can attend show and tells, for instance, and can bring your weeknotes to more people’s attention.
You might worry that people won’t be interested but my experience is that people are way more interested than you assume they are – and if you can add some character and humour to your comms, that will help a lot too.
Come along for the ride
A final idea is to get people from other departments involved in the work you are doing even if they wouldn’t ordinarily be a part of the project. Digital volunteering, in other words. Say you have someone who you’d like to expose to agile delivery methods – why not invite them to play a role on the team, attend the ceremonies, and deliver some of the work. There is no better way of learning this stuff than by doing it and being surrounded by others doing it, and creating a way for people to get experience of it before being involved in a project they are truly responsible for is a great approach.
The importance of inclusion
I can’t finish this article without flagging up the importance of taking an inclusive approach to your capability building. People’s backgrounds can have a huge impact on how they engage with change and new ways of looking at work, and it’s important to ensure that whatever training, workshops or other learning activity you put in place acknowledge this and are built around the needs of those engaging with it. Take the time to understand the people you are going to be working with, and demonstrate that digital doesn’t just mean churning out cookie-cutter experiences using technology.
In other words, your capability programme should be a great exemplar of user centred design itself!
Here’s the recording of the workshop I ran this morning which looked at using a simple template to find out more about the service we are looking to digital redesign.
We used the example of reporting fly tipping, as well as having a general chat towards the end about how best to engage with service managers when embarking on transformation work.
